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I’ve been learning badminton for about a year and recently played my first mixed doubles tournament. We lost badly, as expected, but it was a valuable experience.
I started learning badminton in June 2025, partly inspired by Blue Box, but mainly because I wanted a sport I could continue playing as I grow older. I began with casual group lessons with my family, before moving to weekly private lessons in December 2025. Since June 2026, I’ve also been joining doubles sessions for upper beginners and lower intermediate players.
I was the weakest player in the group and lost nearly every match. That was true even against players who were older or less fit than I was. It was a humbling experience.
One challenge for adult learners is our ego. We tend to expect faster results and set higher expectations for ourselves. In reality, many skills take much longer to develop than we anticipate. We are also too serious at times, which makes it harder to relax and learn things through our body.
I generally avoid comparing myself with others and prefer learning at my own pace. But unlike piano or drawing, badminton is inherently competitive, so progress is often measured against other players. Since my physical abilities will likely decline with age, I also feel a greater sense of urgency to improve while I still can. Mentally, this makes badminton more challenging than my artistic pursuits.
I don’t mind losing or being the weakest player on court. What I dislike is feeling like a burden to my partner or being lectured by players who may not be exceptional but currently perform better than I do. I also recognize that many players have years, if not decades, of experience. Some began playing as children and have continued ever since, making it unlikely that I will ever catch up.
The encouraging part is that my view appears to be correct that, in badminton, technique and skill often matter more than fitness. Many players in their 50s and 60s can beat me comfortably without being exceptionally fit. If I continue improving, perhaps I can become one of those good amateur players in my 50s or 60s, hopefully with the added advantage of better fitness. This is quite different from basketball, where height and athleticism play a much larger role.
Being an adult learner means accepting that you will look bad and start from the bottom. It can be disheartening. Sometimes you wonder why you choose to compete in a field where others have such a large head start. Pursuits with financial rewards or social status are often easier to justify, but hobbies are optional.
Even so, I see badminton as a long-term investment. The game is fun, both playing casually with family and friends, or competitively with good players. In five or ten years, I should be a much better player than I am today. I may never catch those who have been playing for decades, but I can continue improving and become the best player I am capable of becoming.
P.S. Book note on Viktor Axelsen.
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Despite having watched several documentaries about Jordan, I still learned something new, including details about his strained family relationships, his Wizards years, and Phil Jackson’s Machiavellian side. The Bulls may have looked dominant in retrospect, but their championships were hard won.
Jordan was competitive, egotistical, and confident, and he backed his self belief with hard work. In his prime, he was also graceful and charismatic. I relate to his frustration when others care less than I do about things I want to do well. And I see the same competitive drive in my younger son. The challenge is to channel that competitiveness productively without damaging relationships.
P.S. An old post on Michael Jordan about aging, obsession, and glory.
Excerpts:
The “zone” of high performance that other athletes struggled to achieve was something that Jordan accessed on a regular basis. “Michael did have to find something to motivate himself into that state,” Mumford explained. “The more you have those moments in the zone, the more you want to have them. Most people can’t sustain it. His ability to find that state, his ability to concentrate, his ability to lock in were almost superhuman. He was coming from a different place, man.”
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The experience brought Jordan face to face with his own selfishness for the first time. It would be one of the dominant themes of his career, learning to channel the tremendous drive and ego of his competitive into a team game.
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“My greatest skill was being teachable,” Jordan later observed. “I was like a sponge. Even if I thought my coaches were wrong, I tried to listen and learn something.”
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Furious with his teammates, Jordan cursed them yet again at halftime, then sobbed in the back of the team bus afterward. “I was crying and steaming,” he recalled. “I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m out here busting my butt and nobody else is doing the same thing. These guys are kicking our butt, talking our heart, taking our pride.’ I made up my mind right then and there it would never happen again. That was the summer that I first started lifting weights. If I was going to take some of this beating, I was also going to start dishing out some of it. I got tired of them dominating me physically.”
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“I think Scottie was vulnerable because he was human,” Kerr explained. “It’s the reason everybody loved him. You know, he signed that long contract. He was clearly underpaid. It was tough for him to live with that. He felt like he wasn’t appreciated. All the feelings that are associated with almost every human being, that was Scottie, and that’s why we all really appreciated him, because we felt we were more like him, even though we weren’t physically. We were all more like him emotionally than like Michael. Michael didn’t even seem human, he was so confident and so strong.”
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“That was why Phil always used it’s the Us-Against-the Media approach, the Us-Against-the Organization approach, because if he did that, then he could be the leader of the pack.”…”Phil is the master of mind games,” Jordan had said of the coach on several occasions.
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“Obviously we all have weaknesses,” Kerr added and laughed. “Except for Michael. And what he does, he forces us to fight and be competitive, to fight through those weaknesses and not accept them, to work on them, and to improve ourselves.” Make no mistake, though, Kerr said, what Jordan did was pure challenge. “There was not a whole lot of encouragement.”
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“You seem to operate in a zone that seems to be reserved only for you,” Erving told him. “What’s it like when you’re there, Mike?” “It’s like every move, every step, every decision you make, it’s the right decision,” Jordan replied. Jordan was “in the moment,” as George Mumford described it. Every player could fall into a zone on occasion, but he now seemed to reside there.
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The season became the kind of farewell tour that Jordan had once vowed he would never do. When the Wizards visited Los Angeles for his final game against the Lakers, Kobe Bryant offered a parting gift. “Kobe just would up destroying him in the first quarter, like 40 points in the first half of that game,” J.A. Adande recalled. “That was like the true end and the passing of the torch. I mean it had to be humbling for him. I mean there was nothing he could do about it.”
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In conversation, it quickly became obvious that Jordan respected Bryant, without any hint of condescension. He respected any player who did the work, who had the mental toughness. Bryant passed both those tests, he said.
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A few years earlier, the Lakers’ coaching staff had concluded that Bryant and Jordan were much alike, almost eerily so, when it came to the alpha male qualities of their competitive natures. The two were ruthless when it came to winning, everyone agreed. And their skills were similar, although Jordan’s hands were larger.
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“Michael Jordan’s Hall of Fame talk was the Exxon Valdez of speeches,” wrote Rick Reilly in Sports Illustrated. “It was, by turns, rude, vindictive, and flammable. And that was just when he was trying to be funny. It was tactless, egotistical, and unbecoming. When it was done, nobody wanted to be like Mike.”
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David Brooks argues that the people most likely to thrive in the age of AI are those who have a high need for cognition and enjoy mental effort. I don’t know whether he’ll be right, but I share his view on agency. For the things I care about, I find it more rewarding to put in the effort, do the work, and create something within my abilities. I’ve learned to like the things I value, and in most cases to see discomfort and stress as positive catalysts for growth. I like his idea of a hero’s journey. It doesn’t have to be grand, just something we think is worth striving for that helps us grow in the process.
Excerpts:
…what will differentiate people is not how smart they are but their relationship to mental effort. Right now, some people have what psychologists call a high need for cognition. They enjoy thinking hard. These are the people who enjoy playing difficult games and reading dense books. On the other end of the spectrum, there are the cognitive misers, the people who find it unpleasant to think hard and take any opportunity not to do it. In the middle are the people who have a medium need for cognition. They will put in the effort when they really care about something, but they don’t intrinsically enjoy it. Need for cognition correlates with intelligence but is not the same thing. We all know a lot of really smart people who don’t like to work hard…
God seems to have been a puritan. He created us to be the kind of creatures who don’t experience gain without some pain, don’t gain reward without some effort. That’s as true in the world of knowledge work as it is in the world of bodybuilding. Humans learn best when they are in the zone of optimal difficulty, when engaged in tasks that are not so hard as to be overwhelming but not so easy as to require no work…
At first, AI sucks you in. You really do become more productive when using it. But then it threatens to hollow you out, as you become less capable and less knowledgeable. The saddest cases are people who get used to the AI crutch for a bit and then have it taken away…
People with a cultivation mindset seek friction; people with an optimization mindset want their life to be frictionless. Modern technology wants to turn you from a mental muscle builder into a mental couch potato…
The crucial task before us is to cultivate people’s desire to seek out cognitive complexity. Not to go all Joseph Campbell on you, but the essential challenge is: How do we train people to see their life as a hero’s journey in which they take on difficult missions that they may fail at and that will certainly involve pain and suffering? How do we form people so they have an explorer’s heart, a willingness to endure, an ability to struggle on, even when their body and mind are telling them to give up, to reach new destinations and figure stuff out?…
Life is a pilgrimage, a journey—it’s going somewhere, growing from experience, expanding yourself, reaching for some possibility that you do not yet possess. The defining human features therefore are propulsions—the drives that push us to take on mental effort and overcome difficulty—and aspirations: knowing where you want to go, what purpose you serve, what kind of person you’d like to be…
If we can help people learn to want more, hunger more, they’ll be willing to undertake the mental effort to do hard things, and we’ll avoid the cognitive polarization that is staring us in the face. If we can educate people to be clear and wholehearted about what they truly love, then AI will do the calculating and the synthesizing, but humans will still define what matters, what is worth exploring, what missions we go on, and where we end up. That would produce a bot-filled society in which human dignity is preserved, and perhaps even enhanced.
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The things I value often become the things I genuinely like.
Some people see exercise as a chore or healthy eating as a sacrifice. That mindset makes those habits harder to sustain. Instead, I focus on their benefits. Over time, I genuinely enjoy them because I associate them with positive outcomes.
If I don’t exercise, I feel down and less energetic. When I eat well, I feel better. By maintaining a healthy lifestyle most of the time, the occasional indulgence with friends and family becomes more enjoyable and memorable.
I’ve also learned to appreciate discomfort because I believe it makes me stronger and life easier. Ideally, we enjoy the process itself. But even associating an activity with progress may be enough.
Much of what we enjoy is shaped by our mindset. Learning to like what I value feels like the most sustainable path. As we grow, our preferences often evolve with us. And as we consistently choose what we value, we gradually become the person we aspire to be.
PS: Jia Jiang argues that discipline becomes easier when activities are fun. I differ that I don’t mind discomfort or “eating bitterness” if it helps me become the person I aspire to be. But if I eventually enjoy those experiences, are they still “bitterness”?
PPS: Nick Maggiulli argues that commitment is good for us when we know what we like, and that our preferences change based on the decisions we make. He concludes that “…the best commitment you can make to yourself is to consciously choose the things that make life worth living.”
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We now know that memories are not fixed or frozen, like Proust’s jars of preserves in a larder, but are transformed, disassembled, reassembled, and recategorized with every act of recollection.
Memories are often our own creations. If our memories are fallible, then our beliefs are shaped by them as well. My tendency is to value rationality and believe that there is one true version of events, or one realized history, but it is often difficult, if not impossible, to arrive at that truth.
If there is no easy way to separate memory from truth, and if our beliefs are often wrong or shaped by external environment, then the truth may sometimes be impossible to determine. In those cases, we might as well adopt interpretations that improve our lives and make the world a better place.
Maria Popova summarizing Oliver Sacks’s view and pondering whether the fallibility of memory may be essential to creativity.
Excerpts:
We, as human beings, are landed with memory systems that have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections — but also great flexibility and creativity. Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength: if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.
Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and think and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences. It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind, the general commonwealth of knowledge. This sort of sharing and participation, this communion, would not be possible if all our knowledge, our memories, were tagged and identified, seen as private, exclusively ours. Memory is dialogic and arises not only from direct experience but from the intercourse of many minds.
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Eleanor wrote an article about her gym membership experience in China. Regardless of the field, I also prefer coaches who are skilled practitioners themselves, maintain high standards, and remain passionate about their craft. External standards, such as those set by employers, may ensure competence, but intrinsic motivation is what sustains excellence.
Competition governs almost every aspect of Chinese life. From the notoriously gruelling university entrance exams to industrial price wars, success depends on standing out from a vast pool of hardworking rivals…
Oxygym’s standards for staff are exacting. They are assessed according to nine criteria, each stricter than the last…Male and female trainers are expected to maintain body fat below 15 per cent and 20 per cent, respectively, while passing physical tests befitting Navy Seals. Male trainers must deadlift twice their body weight, run 2.7km in 12 minutes and complete 15 unassisted pull-ups. For women trainers, the requirements include deadlifting one and a half times their body weight and 24 consecutive push-ups. While trainers are permitted to exercise on the gym floor, they are discouraged from visibly sweating while doing so.
When I ask Will what a trainer’s personal fitness level has to do with their teaching ability, he appears surprised by the question. “Even if a trainer is very experienced, if they are fat and don’t take care of their appearance, clients won’t want lessons with them,” he says. “The coach should represent an aspiration. They should embody what the student hopes to become.” If a trainer fails to meet those standards, there is a long queue of applicants waiting to take their place.
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